1. Faculty of Geosciences and Environmental Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China;
2. Key Laboratory of High-speed Railway Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
Abstract：The gravity wall anchored horizontally with flexible reinforcements is a new type of anti-seismic structure. In order to determine the seismic earth pressure on the wall, based on the pseudo-static method and the upper bound limit analysis principle with planar sliding failure mechanism, calculation formulas of seismic earth pressure on the wall is deduced considering two possible failure modes including pulling out and pulling off of the reinforcements. The proposed method is verified by a numerical simulation method for a practical example. The influences of internal friction angle and cohesion of earth fill, friction angle of the wall back, vertical spacing between reinforcements, and ultimate tensile force and length of the reinforcements on the seismic earth pressure are specifically discussed. The results show that the seismic earth pressure decreases nonlinearly with the increase in shear strength parameters of the fill, and the external friction angle of the wall has little effect on the seismic earth pressure. Also, as the vertical spacing between the reinforcements increases, the earth pressure increases nonlinearly but the gradient is progressively smaller; after the ultimate tensile force of the lacing reaches a certain value, it has no effect on the earth pressure; as the length of the lacing increases within a certain range, the earth pressure gradually decreases.
